Tag Archives: science fiction

I haven’t seen Prometheus but I feel like I have based on all the bitching online and a live text session with my brother as he watched an online bootleg of it. And, whatever, it sounds like a shitty movie and Ridley Scott clearly has Lucas Complex, which makes me sad, but what really irks me is the people online who use the following argument as to why everyone should just shut up about how the science in the movie is not so much science as huge, glaring plot holes:

“It’s called science FICTION. DUH!”

Firstly, this is dumb because it has the easiest counter-argument of all arguments ever (including internet arguments so…woah):

“It’s called SCIENCE fiction. Dicknuts.”

And I guess that brings me to my whole point. There seems to be a percentage of people that think that since something is made up it should have no rules at all. Any one can like or hate any shitty thing they want, I don’t care, but when you start spouting that science fiction doesn’t need to have any science in it or that you hate the Harry Potter movies because magic shouldn’t have rules what you are really saying is that you can’t express your appreciation or dissatisfaction for a piece of art like an adult and that things would be different in your movie/book/porn if you weren’t too lazy and untalented to make it.

If you have a fantasy story where magic is just “everyone can do whatever they want with no effort” there really isn’t any conflict and that is just boring. Science fiction without the science stretches the audience’s suspension of disbelief too far and when you have completely unlikable or inconsistent characters (like in Prometheus), the audience either doesn’t care or is angry at the time they are wasting.

Here’s an example of the result of the “it’s fiction and fiction can be whatever and everyone should suspend all disbelief forever” argument:

“Tim robbed a bank in Wyoming. The cops were chasing him so he ran south to Canada where he hid in the arctic wasteland of the Grand Canyon. He was eventually caught and sent to Canadian jail where they make you play hockey and apologize all day.”

THAT is fiction without any research or basis in reality at all. Sure, it’s awesome because I wrote it, but if you want something to be more than just silly or ridiculous or funny and actually draw suspense, character empathy, and any shred of believability, you need to actually do some fucking research and not just pull shit out of your butt and use it to fill plot holes. A lack of boundaries and consistent rules within the fictional universe throws the viewer out of that fictional universe. It becomes unrelatable because people are used to a world with rules like physics and the certainty that everyone is an asshole. Even if your fictional universe is that no one is an asshole, you can’t then be like “except that guy…for some reason…probably because the story needs conflict.” The whole story telling experience revolves around the audience feeling like part of the story, which can’t happen if they’re too busy thinking “Wait, why would an educated scientist take off their helmet on their first trip to an alien planet?” My brother says the CDC should use that part of Prometheus in their video “How to contaminate everything.”

To sum up, internal consistency, conflict, and boundaries are why Harry Potter made like a quadbatrillion dollars and has eleventy billion fans while not even your mom will read your series about the boy who can do anything ever in a world where no one is mean and everything always works perfectly and everyone has unicorns that you don’t have to feed and that poop rainbows. Also I’m super pissed there were no aliens in the Alien prequel. Facehuggers = wins; black goo and bad science = super shame spiral and regret punch combo. FINISH HIM!